Re: On language-dependent defaults for character-folding

[Artur Malabarba]

On 9 February 2016 at 18:21, Óscar Fuentes <address@hidden> wrote:
>> I don't know if it's possible to figure out the language of the user's
>> keyboard layout. But the point is that we should care about the
>> language that the user can type in,
>
> Figuring out this (and acting upon that knowledge) looks like a quite
> complex task to me. In practice, letting the user tell Emacs about how
> the char folding should happen is more reasonable.

1. Take the set of all characters in the language that the user types in;
2. Don't fold these characters.

That's all the complexity. If we have a database of characters in a
language, this could even be done automatically. If we don't have such
a database, then all we need is some quick input from a user of that
language (this doesn't need to happen all at once, there's no rush).

> I hope you all realize that the users who can benefit from this feature
> are those who are ill-equiped to search for certain characters,

I could be wrong, but I think you just defined all users. In the
Unicode standard used by Emacs, there are 5721 characters with a
“decomposition” property. Is there a user who is well-equiped to type
all of those characters?

> OTOH
> we have the people who actually write those characters, hence they don't
> need help for searching for them, and who will be pissed to discover
> that Isearch is broken.

The whole point here is to find defaults that won't fold characters of
the user's language.